Post by Rabbi Neil on Nov 18, 2018 17:51:17 GMT
Delivered Kol Nidre 5779
When we open the pages of our machzor, one thing stands out more than anything else – that we can have a relationship with God. The notion of covenant is central to Judaism, as a binding, eternal agreement between God and the Jewish people, and that covenant presupposes that some kind of relationship with God is possible. The entire High Holy Day liturgy is built on the premise of covenant, of an expectation of behavior, and the annual opportunity to acknowledge that our behavior is not what was expected of us, and that God allows us to reset our behavior and start again. The notion of a covenant is predicated on the belief that God is sentient, that God thinks, feels and acts in certain ways. More than that, it is predicated on the belief that God is aware of us, cares about us and responds to our actions. In other words, the notion of covenant presupposes that God is a supernatural Being, that God is ultimately different from us and yet simultaneously very much like us. And yes, there’s a clear contradiction there. But the idea that God is similar to us in terms of sentience isn’t outrageous Biblically since Genesis clearly says that human beings are created in the Divine image. The idea of a God who is very similar to us can be extremely comforting, especially in moments of loneliness. God is the friend who is always there for us, the carer and comforter. This God tells us what we want to hear, what we need to hear, whenever we are troubled. We are never alone with the Supernatural God. Of course, that works both ways. We are never alone. Never! There is no privacy with that Big Brother God. Nothing is hidden from God, who always watches and who always writes down our deeds in a book, although to be fair it is a book whose negative entries can be erased every year so long as we atone properly for our actions.
There is another even darker aspect to a Supernatural God. The High Holy Day liturgy is predicated on God being fair, but life experience suggests otherwise. Good people suffer, sometimes terribly. Innocent people die too young. We know that they didn’t die one year due to their sins the previous year. We know instinctively that bad things happen to good people, and that in and of itself questions the entire premise of the covenant, which assumes God will be faithful and rewards good deeds. For many former believers, no amount of promises of eternal life – a concept the Rabbis added into Judaism once the problem of evil became overwhelming – could possibly balance some of the suffering here on Earth.
In his book Putting God Second, Rabbi Donniel Hartman raises differing concerns about God when considered as a Supernatural Being. He says that this kind of theology leads to two main problems, God Intoxication and God Manipulation. God Intoxication is living in the presence of God to the point that it exhausts one’s ability to see the needs of other human beings. The ultimate example of God Intoxication, he says, is the Akeidah, the Binding of Isaac, when Abraham is so intoxicated by the Divine command that he fails to even see his son in his humanity standing next to him. God Manipulation is a different problem. Here, the identity and the will of God are aligned with the interests and agendas of the individual or community in question. God Intoxication is dangerous in society because it leads to fundamentalism and to the removal of any humanity from religion itself. God Manipulation, on the other hand, enables believers to justify unchecked self-interest. Both are extremely problematic. “When religion is doing its job,” says Rabbi Hartman, “it fills the role of moral mentor, reminding, cajoling, exhorting, and at times threatening its adherents to check their self-interest and become people who see others, who cannot remain indifferent, and who define their religious identities as agents of moral good. But for religion to fulfil this task, it must redefine both the concept and the role of God.”
A theology that involves a supernatural God can not only easily lead to God Intoxication and God Manipulation, but also to a separation between the tangible world around us and Divinity. More than that, as we saw on Rosh Hashanah, that understanding of God has for millennia perpetuated a patriarchal power structure that is clearly not appropriate, not only because it excludes women but also because it creates an unhealthy way of thinking about ourselves and God. As Rabbi David Cooper says, “As long as we relate to God as Father and we as children, we sustain the dysfunctional paternalistic model in which Father knows best. We not only remain alienated with a sense of abandonment, we relinquish our personal sense of responsibility. We think Father will take care of everything.” That may or may not be correct – it depends what age the children are and what the Father expects of them. Nonetheless, God the Father remains challenging for many. And even if we added to our tradition female metaphors of God that would only be a start… and there are many such metaphors. Hosea 11:3-4 describes God as a mother who taught the people to walk, who took the people up in her arms, who was like one who lifts infants to her cheeks and who bends down to feed them. Two chapters later, (Hos. 13:8) God is literally described as an angry mama bear. Deuteronomy also uses animal imagery (Deut. 32:11-12) with God described as a mother eagle hovering over her young. There is even a reference to God birthing mentioned in the book of Deuteronomy (32:18). Isaiah has God as a woman in labor (42:14), as a nursing mother (49:15) and as a comforting mother (66:13). Even if these metaphors came into contemporary theology, they’re still limited by anthropomorphism because they’re nouns.
And this is where we come up against the limits of language, and how it shapes the way we think as much as it is shaped by the way we think.
It is said that Torah speaks in the language of man, and that much is true on more than one level. What most of us don’t consider is what words mean as we say them. For example, when we talk of God being Avinu, our Father, are we talking about God’s essence or God’s effect? Are we saying that God is a Father to us, or are we saying that the effect of God on us is like the effect of a father? Most of us don’t even think about such things, and just say the word. But if we take these words as describing God’s essence, or God’s being, then we are probably taking the metaphors in ways that they were not meant. As Rabbi Marc Angel observes, in Exodus 33:20, God passes by Moses and says “No-one can see Me and live,” meaning that we can see the effects of God but cannot behold God’s true being. So, no words about God are actually about God, they’re about the effect of God on us. Martin Buber felt the same about all words, saying that “Basic words do not signify things but relations. Basic words do not state something that might exist outside them; by being spoken they establish a mode of existence.” What he means – I think! I can never be too sure with Buber! – is that words do not ever describe, but they instead establish relationship. And if that’s the case with words about things we can see, how much more must it be true about God? Looking at the same verse from Exodus, Abraham Joshua Heschel says, “The mystery of God remains forever sealed to man.,,Even the seraphim cover their faces with their wings in the presence of God (Isaiah 6:2).” All three say the same thing – words about God aren’t really about God at all. And if that’s the case, perhaps we can change the way we talk about God, or at least change the way we view the traditional words used to describe God. If we accept that that is possible, then we can ask the next question in this year’s series of High Holy Day sermons – “What if our Jewish theology were not predicated on supernaturalism?” We’re so used to God being a noun, a person, a thing, the Ultimate Being (with Being as a noun), that we often forget that God clearly identified to Moses not as a noun, but as a verb. “Moses said to God, ‘What if I go to the Israelites and say to them “The God of your ancestors has sent me to you,” and they ask me, “What is his name?” What shall I tell them?’ So God said to Moses, ‘ehyeh asher ehyeh – I AM that I AM. This is what you are to say to the Israelites – “I AM has sent me to you.”’ Whether we translate ehyeh asher ehyeh as ‘I am that I am,’ or ‘I shall be as I shall be,’ the point remains the same – God identifies not as a person, not as a thing, but as a verb, as being. The very name yud-hay-vav-hay used to have a mystical sense relating to the verb to be. Probably the best translations I’ve seen of that word is “Eternal,” which is being throughout time. What the word definitely does not say is Lord. That was a later imposition by the Rabbis when the Priesthood ended and the pronunciation of the name was forgotten, so they superimposed the sound of another word on top. The name clearly doesn’t read as Adonai because there’s no letter dalet or letter nun in yud-hey-vav-hey. Every time we say Adonai, then, we turn a verb into a noun, in fact, we turn the Ultimate Verb into a patriarchal noun. In so doing, we profoundly limit God. But to get rid of that sound after two thousand years, that would be a real challenge, perhaps impossible, because it’s so ingrained in the Jewish psyche. The least we can do, though, is to acknowledge the historical context of the sound of Adonai, and then explore what that name really means, and think about God differently when we say that name.
This notion of God as a verb instead of a noun is not new. In the 1960s, R Buckminster Fuller specifically stated God is a verb. In the 1970s, Mary Daly accused those who speak of God as a noun as being complicit “in Verbicide – killing of the living, transformative energy of words,” [and of] (xvii) muting of the metamorphic, shapeshifting powers inherent in words.” In the 1990s, while Rabbi David Cooper was writing that, “God is not a thing, a being, a noun,” Rabbi Harold Schulweis was proposing “a shift of focus, from noun to verb, from subject to predicate, from God as person to Godliness, in Hebrew Elohuth.” This isn’t new, within global or even Jewish theology. But is a theology in which God is a verb something that falls within the realm of acceptable Jewish thought? Secular humanist Jewish author Judith Seid wrote in her book, God-Optional Judaism, that “calling Judaism a religion is historically inaccurate. Judaism,” she says, “is not one religion and has never been only one religion. The diversity of beliefs that has always existed in Judaism is testimony to that. And modern mainstream Judaism is just as diverse. Reform and Orthodox Jews believe very little, if anything, in common. They differ on the nature of God, the nature of humanity, the existence of an afterlife, the authority of the halacha, and just about everything else. There is no creed that defines Jewish religion, and there is no one set of Jewish beliefs that can be defined as the Jewish religion. Religion is what divides the Jewish People. What holds us together is our sense of heritage, culture, and commitment to our people.” I found myself challenged. Could that possibly be correct? I quickly realized that the answer is no, I think she’s profoundly mistaken. There is a strand that connects all the differing branches of the same religion, and Judaism is and will always be, to use the words of Rabbi Mordecai Kaplan, “an evolving religious civilization.” That strand that connects us all, through our differing Jewish theologies and practices, is one word – yud-hay-vav-hay – the Tetragrammaton, the four letter Name of God. We all share it. An authentic Jewish theology is one that refers to God through this name. There may be other names, but that one is key. There may be differing pronunciations, the most common of which is Adonai. Our responses to that name may be wildly different, but they are all still Jewish religious responses. An authentic Jewish theology is one that connects easily to that name. And what could be more authentic than a theology which acknowledges that name as it was originally presented to our people – as a verb?
What might it mean for us to consider viewing God as a verb, especially as we gather together on Kol Nidre? It does not mean rejecting the liturgy – absolutely not. It does mean considering prayer in a differing way to usual, though. Heschel says that “to pray is to take notice of the wonder, to regain a sense of the mystery that animates all beings, the divine margin in all attainments. Prayer is our humble answer to the inconceivable surprise of living. It is all we can offer in return for the mystery by which we live.” So, prayer is not a ‘phone conversation, it’s an expression of self in the presence of that which is larger than ourselves. Or, as Heschel also said, “Prayer… is an event that comes to pass between the soul of man and the word.” It’s not magic. We don’t say the right words and then good things happen. That’s not prayer. That’s God Manipulation. A lot of our traditional prayers use metaphors of God as noun. For our liturgy to come alive again, it may just help to ask what those metaphors originally meant to us when presented as nouns, and what they could mean for us now as verbs. When God is presented as A Being, what would it mean to us were God simply Being?
If our tradition speaks in our language, let us now consciously expand our language, and thereby expand our tradition. The inversion of metaphors isn’t new either. In Talmud, “Abaye explained: …. ‘And you shall love the Eternal your God,” … means that the Name of Heaven [should] be beloved because of you.” Love of God means God should be loved because of you! That’s an extraordinary inversion of Sh’ma - not that we should pour out love, but that God (however we understand God) should become loved through the way we live our lives! Is ‘God as a verb’ so ridiculous if we can bend religious metaphors so far as Talmud does here?!? I would suggest not.
Now, I accept that this may be the most challenging sermon I’ve ever given theologically. As I close, I bring in Rabbi Harold Schulweis once again, who wrote not of God but of Godliness. He said that “Godliness is in the activity of doing justly, healing the sick, raising the fallen, supporting the disadvantaged, uniting the real and ideal. To believe in Godliness is to believe in the verbs and adverbs that refer to the activities of divinity.” When we speak of God, maybe we should be considering Godliness instead.
To close with our question, then… What if our Jewish theology were not predicated on supernaturalism? Perhaps the short answer is that we might stop obeying God as naughty children groveling for forgiveness, and we might instead start exploring, experiencing and emulating Godliness. And if that isn’t the point of Yom Kippur, I don’t know what is. And the good thing about this sermon is that you can totally ignore it (although I appreciate that that probably applies to all of my sermons)! What I mean is that if the idea of God is so bound up in being a noun for you, a person, a being, then you can have heard this sermon and hopefully think, “Interesting, but no thanks.” But… it’s actually possible, as Mary Daly once wrote, that “the Verb” could be “infinitely more personal than a mere static noun.” In that case, with a bit of working out a new way to read the liturgy, then maybe considering God as a verb, as difficult as the initial transition may be, will open up an entirely new depth of the liturgy for you. May we, then, feel free to open the door to a different, exciting theology by no longer groveling to God, but instead by exploring, experiencing and emulating Godliness. May we connect not with a Being, but with all Being. And let us say, Amen.
When we open the pages of our machzor, one thing stands out more than anything else – that we can have a relationship with God. The notion of covenant is central to Judaism, as a binding, eternal agreement between God and the Jewish people, and that covenant presupposes that some kind of relationship with God is possible. The entire High Holy Day liturgy is built on the premise of covenant, of an expectation of behavior, and the annual opportunity to acknowledge that our behavior is not what was expected of us, and that God allows us to reset our behavior and start again. The notion of a covenant is predicated on the belief that God is sentient, that God thinks, feels and acts in certain ways. More than that, it is predicated on the belief that God is aware of us, cares about us and responds to our actions. In other words, the notion of covenant presupposes that God is a supernatural Being, that God is ultimately different from us and yet simultaneously very much like us. And yes, there’s a clear contradiction there. But the idea that God is similar to us in terms of sentience isn’t outrageous Biblically since Genesis clearly says that human beings are created in the Divine image. The idea of a God who is very similar to us can be extremely comforting, especially in moments of loneliness. God is the friend who is always there for us, the carer and comforter. This God tells us what we want to hear, what we need to hear, whenever we are troubled. We are never alone with the Supernatural God. Of course, that works both ways. We are never alone. Never! There is no privacy with that Big Brother God. Nothing is hidden from God, who always watches and who always writes down our deeds in a book, although to be fair it is a book whose negative entries can be erased every year so long as we atone properly for our actions.
There is another even darker aspect to a Supernatural God. The High Holy Day liturgy is predicated on God being fair, but life experience suggests otherwise. Good people suffer, sometimes terribly. Innocent people die too young. We know that they didn’t die one year due to their sins the previous year. We know instinctively that bad things happen to good people, and that in and of itself questions the entire premise of the covenant, which assumes God will be faithful and rewards good deeds. For many former believers, no amount of promises of eternal life – a concept the Rabbis added into Judaism once the problem of evil became overwhelming – could possibly balance some of the suffering here on Earth.
In his book Putting God Second, Rabbi Donniel Hartman raises differing concerns about God when considered as a Supernatural Being. He says that this kind of theology leads to two main problems, God Intoxication and God Manipulation. God Intoxication is living in the presence of God to the point that it exhausts one’s ability to see the needs of other human beings. The ultimate example of God Intoxication, he says, is the Akeidah, the Binding of Isaac, when Abraham is so intoxicated by the Divine command that he fails to even see his son in his humanity standing next to him. God Manipulation is a different problem. Here, the identity and the will of God are aligned with the interests and agendas of the individual or community in question. God Intoxication is dangerous in society because it leads to fundamentalism and to the removal of any humanity from religion itself. God Manipulation, on the other hand, enables believers to justify unchecked self-interest. Both are extremely problematic. “When religion is doing its job,” says Rabbi Hartman, “it fills the role of moral mentor, reminding, cajoling, exhorting, and at times threatening its adherents to check their self-interest and become people who see others, who cannot remain indifferent, and who define their religious identities as agents of moral good. But for religion to fulfil this task, it must redefine both the concept and the role of God.”
A theology that involves a supernatural God can not only easily lead to God Intoxication and God Manipulation, but also to a separation between the tangible world around us and Divinity. More than that, as we saw on Rosh Hashanah, that understanding of God has for millennia perpetuated a patriarchal power structure that is clearly not appropriate, not only because it excludes women but also because it creates an unhealthy way of thinking about ourselves and God. As Rabbi David Cooper says, “As long as we relate to God as Father and we as children, we sustain the dysfunctional paternalistic model in which Father knows best. We not only remain alienated with a sense of abandonment, we relinquish our personal sense of responsibility. We think Father will take care of everything.” That may or may not be correct – it depends what age the children are and what the Father expects of them. Nonetheless, God the Father remains challenging for many. And even if we added to our tradition female metaphors of God that would only be a start… and there are many such metaphors. Hosea 11:3-4 describes God as a mother who taught the people to walk, who took the people up in her arms, who was like one who lifts infants to her cheeks and who bends down to feed them. Two chapters later, (Hos. 13:8) God is literally described as an angry mama bear. Deuteronomy also uses animal imagery (Deut. 32:11-12) with God described as a mother eagle hovering over her young. There is even a reference to God birthing mentioned in the book of Deuteronomy (32:18). Isaiah has God as a woman in labor (42:14), as a nursing mother (49:15) and as a comforting mother (66:13). Even if these metaphors came into contemporary theology, they’re still limited by anthropomorphism because they’re nouns.
And this is where we come up against the limits of language, and how it shapes the way we think as much as it is shaped by the way we think.
It is said that Torah speaks in the language of man, and that much is true on more than one level. What most of us don’t consider is what words mean as we say them. For example, when we talk of God being Avinu, our Father, are we talking about God’s essence or God’s effect? Are we saying that God is a Father to us, or are we saying that the effect of God on us is like the effect of a father? Most of us don’t even think about such things, and just say the word. But if we take these words as describing God’s essence, or God’s being, then we are probably taking the metaphors in ways that they were not meant. As Rabbi Marc Angel observes, in Exodus 33:20, God passes by Moses and says “No-one can see Me and live,” meaning that we can see the effects of God but cannot behold God’s true being. So, no words about God are actually about God, they’re about the effect of God on us. Martin Buber felt the same about all words, saying that “Basic words do not signify things but relations. Basic words do not state something that might exist outside them; by being spoken they establish a mode of existence.” What he means – I think! I can never be too sure with Buber! – is that words do not ever describe, but they instead establish relationship. And if that’s the case with words about things we can see, how much more must it be true about God? Looking at the same verse from Exodus, Abraham Joshua Heschel says, “The mystery of God remains forever sealed to man.,,Even the seraphim cover their faces with their wings in the presence of God (Isaiah 6:2).” All three say the same thing – words about God aren’t really about God at all. And if that’s the case, perhaps we can change the way we talk about God, or at least change the way we view the traditional words used to describe God. If we accept that that is possible, then we can ask the next question in this year’s series of High Holy Day sermons – “What if our Jewish theology were not predicated on supernaturalism?” We’re so used to God being a noun, a person, a thing, the Ultimate Being (with Being as a noun), that we often forget that God clearly identified to Moses not as a noun, but as a verb. “Moses said to God, ‘What if I go to the Israelites and say to them “The God of your ancestors has sent me to you,” and they ask me, “What is his name?” What shall I tell them?’ So God said to Moses, ‘ehyeh asher ehyeh – I AM that I AM. This is what you are to say to the Israelites – “I AM has sent me to you.”’ Whether we translate ehyeh asher ehyeh as ‘I am that I am,’ or ‘I shall be as I shall be,’ the point remains the same – God identifies not as a person, not as a thing, but as a verb, as being. The very name yud-hay-vav-hay used to have a mystical sense relating to the verb to be. Probably the best translations I’ve seen of that word is “Eternal,” which is being throughout time. What the word definitely does not say is Lord. That was a later imposition by the Rabbis when the Priesthood ended and the pronunciation of the name was forgotten, so they superimposed the sound of another word on top. The name clearly doesn’t read as Adonai because there’s no letter dalet or letter nun in yud-hey-vav-hey. Every time we say Adonai, then, we turn a verb into a noun, in fact, we turn the Ultimate Verb into a patriarchal noun. In so doing, we profoundly limit God. But to get rid of that sound after two thousand years, that would be a real challenge, perhaps impossible, because it’s so ingrained in the Jewish psyche. The least we can do, though, is to acknowledge the historical context of the sound of Adonai, and then explore what that name really means, and think about God differently when we say that name.
This notion of God as a verb instead of a noun is not new. In the 1960s, R Buckminster Fuller specifically stated God is a verb. In the 1970s, Mary Daly accused those who speak of God as a noun as being complicit “in Verbicide – killing of the living, transformative energy of words,” [and of] (xvii) muting of the metamorphic, shapeshifting powers inherent in words.” In the 1990s, while Rabbi David Cooper was writing that, “God is not a thing, a being, a noun,” Rabbi Harold Schulweis was proposing “a shift of focus, from noun to verb, from subject to predicate, from God as person to Godliness, in Hebrew Elohuth.” This isn’t new, within global or even Jewish theology. But is a theology in which God is a verb something that falls within the realm of acceptable Jewish thought? Secular humanist Jewish author Judith Seid wrote in her book, God-Optional Judaism, that “calling Judaism a religion is historically inaccurate. Judaism,” she says, “is not one religion and has never been only one religion. The diversity of beliefs that has always existed in Judaism is testimony to that. And modern mainstream Judaism is just as diverse. Reform and Orthodox Jews believe very little, if anything, in common. They differ on the nature of God, the nature of humanity, the existence of an afterlife, the authority of the halacha, and just about everything else. There is no creed that defines Jewish religion, and there is no one set of Jewish beliefs that can be defined as the Jewish religion. Religion is what divides the Jewish People. What holds us together is our sense of heritage, culture, and commitment to our people.” I found myself challenged. Could that possibly be correct? I quickly realized that the answer is no, I think she’s profoundly mistaken. There is a strand that connects all the differing branches of the same religion, and Judaism is and will always be, to use the words of Rabbi Mordecai Kaplan, “an evolving religious civilization.” That strand that connects us all, through our differing Jewish theologies and practices, is one word – yud-hay-vav-hay – the Tetragrammaton, the four letter Name of God. We all share it. An authentic Jewish theology is one that refers to God through this name. There may be other names, but that one is key. There may be differing pronunciations, the most common of which is Adonai. Our responses to that name may be wildly different, but they are all still Jewish religious responses. An authentic Jewish theology is one that connects easily to that name. And what could be more authentic than a theology which acknowledges that name as it was originally presented to our people – as a verb?
What might it mean for us to consider viewing God as a verb, especially as we gather together on Kol Nidre? It does not mean rejecting the liturgy – absolutely not. It does mean considering prayer in a differing way to usual, though. Heschel says that “to pray is to take notice of the wonder, to regain a sense of the mystery that animates all beings, the divine margin in all attainments. Prayer is our humble answer to the inconceivable surprise of living. It is all we can offer in return for the mystery by which we live.” So, prayer is not a ‘phone conversation, it’s an expression of self in the presence of that which is larger than ourselves. Or, as Heschel also said, “Prayer… is an event that comes to pass between the soul of man and the word.” It’s not magic. We don’t say the right words and then good things happen. That’s not prayer. That’s God Manipulation. A lot of our traditional prayers use metaphors of God as noun. For our liturgy to come alive again, it may just help to ask what those metaphors originally meant to us when presented as nouns, and what they could mean for us now as verbs. When God is presented as A Being, what would it mean to us were God simply Being?
If our tradition speaks in our language, let us now consciously expand our language, and thereby expand our tradition. The inversion of metaphors isn’t new either. In Talmud, “Abaye explained: …. ‘And you shall love the Eternal your God,” … means that the Name of Heaven [should] be beloved because of you.” Love of God means God should be loved because of you! That’s an extraordinary inversion of Sh’ma - not that we should pour out love, but that God (however we understand God) should become loved through the way we live our lives! Is ‘God as a verb’ so ridiculous if we can bend religious metaphors so far as Talmud does here?!? I would suggest not.
Now, I accept that this may be the most challenging sermon I’ve ever given theologically. As I close, I bring in Rabbi Harold Schulweis once again, who wrote not of God but of Godliness. He said that “Godliness is in the activity of doing justly, healing the sick, raising the fallen, supporting the disadvantaged, uniting the real and ideal. To believe in Godliness is to believe in the verbs and adverbs that refer to the activities of divinity.” When we speak of God, maybe we should be considering Godliness instead.
To close with our question, then… What if our Jewish theology were not predicated on supernaturalism? Perhaps the short answer is that we might stop obeying God as naughty children groveling for forgiveness, and we might instead start exploring, experiencing and emulating Godliness. And if that isn’t the point of Yom Kippur, I don’t know what is. And the good thing about this sermon is that you can totally ignore it (although I appreciate that that probably applies to all of my sermons)! What I mean is that if the idea of God is so bound up in being a noun for you, a person, a being, then you can have heard this sermon and hopefully think, “Interesting, but no thanks.” But… it’s actually possible, as Mary Daly once wrote, that “the Verb” could be “infinitely more personal than a mere static noun.” In that case, with a bit of working out a new way to read the liturgy, then maybe considering God as a verb, as difficult as the initial transition may be, will open up an entirely new depth of the liturgy for you. May we, then, feel free to open the door to a different, exciting theology by no longer groveling to God, but instead by exploring, experiencing and emulating Godliness. May we connect not with a Being, but with all Being. And let us say, Amen.